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The FCC’s Plan for Net Neutrality

This is already stacking up to be the most disruptive year for telco regulations that I can remember in my career. While 1996 and the Telecom Act brought a lot of changes, it looks like it’s possible that many of the regulations that have been the core of our industry for a long time might be overturned, re-examined or scrapped. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – for example, I think a lot of the blame for the condition of the cable TV market for small providers can be blamed on the FCC sticking with programming rules that are clearly obsolete.

We now know for sure that one of our newest regulations, net neutrality, is going to largely be done away with at the FCC. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has now told us about his plans for undoing net neutrality. His plan has several components. First, he proposes to undo Title II regulation of ISPs. Without that form of regulation, net neutrality naturally dies. It took nearly a decade for the FCC to find a path for net neutrality, and Title II was the only solution that the courts would support to give the FCC any authority over broadband.

However, Pai says that he still supports the general concepts of net neutrality such as no blocking of content and no paid priority for Internet traffic. Pai proposes that those concepts be maintained by having the ISPs put them into the ISP’s terms of service. Pai also doesn’t think the FCC should be the one enforcing net neutrality and wants to pass this responsibility to the Federal Trade Commission.

It’s hard to know where to start with that suggested solution. Consider the following:

·I’m concerned as a customer of one of the big cable companies that removing Title II regulation is going to mean ever-increasing broadband rates, in the same way we’ve seen with cable rates. While the FCC said they didn’t plan to directly regulate data rates, they’ve already put pressure on the big ISPs over the last few years to ease up on data caps. Since the big ISPs have tremendous pressure from Wall Street to always make more, they have little option other than increasing data rates as a way to increase the bottom line.

·Unless some federal agency proscribes specific and unalterable net neutrality language, every ISP is going to come up with a different way to describe this in their terms of service. This means that the topic can never really be regulated. For example, if somebody was to sue an ISP over net neutrality, any court ruling would be specific to only that ISP since everybody else will be using different language. Regulation requires some level of consistency and if every ISP tackles this in a different way then we have a free for all.

·Probably the most contentious issue that brought about net neutrality was the big fights between ISPs and companies like Netflix over the interconnection of networks. I recall the FCC saying during some of those cases that they were one of the most challenging technical issues they had ever tackled. It’s hard to think that the FTC is going to have the ability to intercede in disputes of this complexity.

·The proposed solution presupposes that the FTC will have the budget and the staff to take on something as complex as net neutrality. From what I can see it’s more likely that most federal agencies are going to have to deal with smaller budgets in coming years. And we know from long experience that regulations that are not enforced might as well not exist.

Interestingly, the big ISPs all say that they are not against the general principles of no paid priority and no blocking of content. Of course, they have a different interpretation of what both of those things mean. For example, now that a lot of the big ISPs are also content providers they think they should be able to offer their own content on a zero-rating basis. But overall I believe that they were okay with the net neutrality rules. They don’t like the Title II regulation because they fear rate regulation, but I think they mostly see that an open Internet benefits everybody, including them.

The one thing that big ISPs have always said is that the thing they want most from regulation is consistency and predictability. All of the changes that the FCC are making now are largely due to a change in administration – and in the long run the ISPs know this is not to their benefit. Of course, they have always complained about whatever rules are in place, and frankly that’s part of the industry game that has been around forever. But the last the thing the big ISPs want is for the rules to swing wildly back the other way in a future administration. That creates uncertainty. It’s hard to design products or to devise a 5-year business plan if you don’t know the rules that govern the industry.